Catherine Newman

From now on all my favorite Catherine Newman blurbs will be listed under a "Catherine Newman" header. That way, if you care you can read on or just skip these and go straight to the kids stuff or my ramblings.

But after a hard week — we are sad about the untimely death of an old friend, the mother of one of my very favorite teenagers on the planet — I'm in the mood for comic relief. And I'm not getting it from the (ceaseless) rain outside, but within the house, there's no shortage. I sit in the living room with my computer, trying absurdly to write while the kids balance themselves on the back of the couch to wrap their arms around my neck and kiss my hair with their lips and kiss my hair with an X-Files Agent Scully figurine. "Do you want to go into the study to work?" Michael asks gently. And it's a sensible question, but I don't. I just want to be here, where everybody else is, where my life hums with, well, with life itself. Even if one thing leads to another, and before you know it Michael is strumming the Billy Joel "Brenda and Eddie" song on a ukulele. Then he switches to guitar, Ben joins in on his guitar, with Birdy on a plastic whistle, and they jam a rocking version of "If I Were a Rich Man" and then a serious, gorgeous rendition of the Patty Griffin song "Top of the World." There is much dancing around in underpants, and it is both silly and beautiful.

I can be so awkward sometimes, trying to create special moments as if I'm following the directions in a kit I ordered from a catalogue: we'll light this candle in this way accompanied by this feeling; we'll read this poem together and be very poignant and sober. And other times, the blessings just wash up in unbidden, unexpected heaps on the shore of my day. The trick I'm learning is not to pass them by. Not to leave this happy scene to check my email or put the kettle on. "I'm wrestling with restlessness," I said to Michael earlier this summer when we were on the beach, and he'd laughed but said, "You really are. I can tell." I'm trying not to skitter away from the sitting still or the chaos. I know it's boring to say it, so obvious that it's almost silly, but the lesson of death is that we die — which is the same as saying that we're living now. Our friend's parting command to the people she loved was: "Dance." And so we do.

I just can't say enough how she so easily captures how I feel a great deal of the time. I can so clearly see my own living room while reading her words. There is something to be said for just sitting amongst the chaos. Life lessons seem so fleeting in the mind sometimes. I wonder what the glue is that makes them stick? Too many times it seems like it is regret, guilt, or loss. That it always seems to only really click while looking behind you. I really do want to know how to live life differently in regards to this.